Hey everyone!
Fandom Stars gathered for a unique opportunity to engage directly with the team responsible for shaping their editing experience – the User Experience (UX) team at Fandom. The roundtable discussion featured members from Fandom’s UX team, including:
- Will Vong: Head of Product Design
- Jase Sanders: Senior Manager of Product Management
- Patrick Backman: Senior Product Manager
- Jenny Uchisawa: Senior Community Manager of Trust & Safety
The event kicked off with the UX team sharing insights into their current projects and upcoming plans for the platform. Stars even had the opportunity to sneak peek at a feature coming to the community in the near future! The conversation quickly opened up to an engaging Q&A session, where Fandom Stars had the chance to pose their questions, concerns, and suggestions directly to the team. This direct line of communication emphasized the value Fandom places on community feedback, recognizing the Stars as integral community partners in the platform's ongoing evolution.
Throughout the roundtable, discussions touched upon a wide range of topics, from specific features and tools to broader questions about the overall user experience and the team’s process and goals. Stars shared their experiences, offering valuable perspectives on what works well and what could be improved. This collaborative exchange of ideas fostered a sense of shared purpose and excitement for the future of Fandom.
For those unable to attend, this recap will highlight key questions from Stars and information from the UX team, ensuring that the entire Fandom community benefits from the insights and discussions that emerged during this special event. Stay tuned for updates and further opportunities to connect with the Fandom team and contribute to shaping a platform that continues to empower and inspire fans worldwide.
Key Questions and Answers from the Roundtable:[]
Which tools are you using at work? (E.g. Figma, Photoshop, ProtoPie)
Will Vong: To start - we are mostly a Figma design house. Our design systems are authored in Figma. Occassionally we use Photoshop or Illustrator for icons or illustrations. Animation is with After Effects. CMS is with Zeplin. All of our prototyping and compositions are in Figma though.
Which new UX feature that is currently being tested are you most enthusiastic about how it will improve users' experience?
Pat Backmann: Definitely the Drawer. For both the mobile and desktop experience. It will potentially give us a new place to coalesces much of the Fandom things, that are intended to extend the fan's time and experience on the site into one, understandable and predictable location.
We often talk about improved communication from Fandom to users, how do you feel the communication from users to Fandom could also be improved? Is there an example of a change to a feature that was based on well communicated feedback from users?
Jase Sanders: Someone already mentioned it, but the recent changes to Interactive Maps 100% came from user feedback. In that case, we even had custom plugins developed as a test case for the types of features users wanted, talked directly with folks building those maps, and tried to build the most requested at scale/performantly for the entire platform.
In my opinion, we could do a better job of mining ideas from custom scripts or implementations that y'all are already doing, like we did with maps. There isn't really a better indicator of "this would be helpful" than "I went through the pain of doing this sub-optimally myself already because it's that important to me"
Which UX experiments had the most surprising response from users, either more positively or more negatively than expected?
Pat Backmann: The biggest surprise to me is the amount of experiments that come back stating little or no effect. Fortunately, most of these are clean-up efforts to give fans a more heuristic and standard experience so we know it's not hurting anything before going live. Like New Navigation, Collapsing the Table of Contents, Cleaning up the Widgets in the Right Rail to name a few.
Will Vong: More recently at Community Connect we shared some ideas around search and microinteractions. We got very strong feedback against moving content on the page due to accessbility. Since the experiment was early stage, we knew this would be a problem and it was clear that our community is sensitive to Accessbility issues.
Jase Sanders: A recent experiment to prompt registering for an account after using the maps "progress tracking" feature had an >1,000% conversion rate improvement. I knew it'd be big because we were going from "not saying anything at all about registering for an account" to "giving context and directing you to the sign-in flow" ... but still, I've not seen numbers that big too often in my career.
Will Vong: Also we are working on general nav updates for the left nav to make them more personalized to our users with wiki pinning, an MRU (most recently used) - thought this would be a winner but have gotten subdued response. Since it was limited to sample test communities, maybe it would get better reactions when it goes public.
Jase Sanders: We've also seen conversion rates sometimes go down when we improve the page load speed. Counterintuitive, since you'd think faster must be better, right? Turns out what can happen is you start counting page views that never would have occurred before because it didn't load in time for them. So you have to make sure "conversion rate" isn't the only thing you look at, otherwise you'd just make the site load slower all the time and "win"
When looking for ideas for UX improvements, how much comes from suggestions from users, and how much comes from your own ideas or from wider company initiatives?
Will Vong: Ideas can come from anywhere, PMs, devs, community, etc. But if we are following UX research methodology, we use a Jobs to be Done framework that lays out UX problems into User, Situations, Motivation, and Design Outcomes. We try to identify these before we start design research to lay a groundwork on what we are designing. We also look at the whole user journey - looking at opportinies to extend the experiences from Attract, Entry, Engage, Transform and Extend
But good ideas are open to anyone so we find designs through both generative research, Qual and Quant usabilty testing, and user feedback
Jase Sanders: At the company-wide level we mostly have directions, ideals, or metrics areas of interest/targets, rather than specific feature ideas. So we might say something like "we want to make it easier to find what you're looking for on our platform" and then it's up to the individual teams to try and figure out how best to achieve that. When it comes to the actual ideas... it'll vary of course, but it's probably something like an even split between 1) intuitive ideas from the team, designers, whoever at Fandom, 2) user feedback from high-frequency folks like yourselves, 3) data from the current use of the site as a proxy for "low frequency" users, and 4) industry opportunities or competitor features. As PMs, we very much take the position that "the best idea" is the idea-- doesn't matter where it comes from.
One of the things I would like to know related to that question is what is the best way for users to make suggestions. Because leaving comments in #feedback-fandom or through tickets sometimes feels like shouting into the void. Or maybe there could be a semi-regular roundtable/AMA/hackathon for users to suggest ideas for features they'd like to see
Jase Sanders: This is definitely an area we're looking to improve. Even managing our own ideas backlog, their status, value, etc. can be a challenge. We've discussed some options with the CM team about how/where to capture ideas from Discord or other sources from editors, as well as options for how to "publish" that list as appropriate. Right now, probably "ask your CM" and they make sure it's "on the list" and gets a response from someone like me is the best method-- but not ideal at all.
Do you have an idea (in terms of numbers) of the amount of experiments you rune every year? Like how many are successful, unsuccessful, neutral, etc. Or just "experiments statistics" to share?
Pat Backmann: Not an exact number and as far as having a historical log, that is something we need to improve. but for the UX team only excluding what the Generated Content and Advertisement teams have done, we have done around 15-20 experiments this year, each of which had multiple permutations.
Jase Sanders: Quick math... let's see... we try to run ~2 experiments/month, per let's say half a dozen teams... so it's something like 100 or so /year, if we're running at the pace we want to be. Industry-wide (all tech), the hit rate for experiments (statistically significant positive result) is well under 1/3. I ballpark 25% (1 in 4) as a rule of thumb. Probably 50% are neutral and 25% "bad".
Finally, Stars asked UX team members about moonshot ideas that they would like to explore if they had the opportunity to create them, and this is what they envisioned for the Fandom platform.
Jase Sanders: My crazy idea is some kind of "lens" that knows where I personally am in a story, a game, a show, whatever, and I can navigate everything as if it was that exact moment. Like the Web Archive pages, snapshots in time, but for a fictional continuity.
Will Vong: I'd love to see advancements in user generated widgets, libraries and content that helps personalize your Fandoms. What does your Fandoms mean to you and your friends? I would also love to be more innovative in advancing the Wiki platform for creation (templates, tools, custom UX) and consumption (reading, viewing, collecting, researching) of wikis. We take so much inspiration from Wikipedia, what can we do to push the wiki medium further?
Pat Backmann: I think my moon shot idea is a bit generic but hey. I want a simple place where I can go to look up something, learn something, and explore something. A place that is predictable, loads fast, looks clean, and 'feels' consistent to the subject I am there to experience. I want the game i am visiting to feel like the game, the movie I visit to feel like the movie, etc. I want to find what I am looking for quickly and be invited to stay longer. I don't want ads to bother me, but I understand why they are there. I want the information to be as dynamic as the creator intended it to be. I want the tooling to be intuitive and fun. Sorry for being boring lol
If you had a moonshot idea, and could implement ANY feature on Fandom, what would it be and why? Let us know in the comments!
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